Julia Ward Howe

Julia Ward Howe (27 May 1819-17 October 1910) was an American abolitionist, poet, author, and women's suffrage activist who wrote "The Battle Hymn of the Republic" during the American Civil War.

Biography
Julia Ward Howe was born in New York City, New York in 1819, a distant relative of Francis Marion. In 1843, she married Samuel Gridley Howe, a Boston physician and reformer, and they raised their family in South Boston. In 1852, they moved to Portsmouth, Rhode Island, and she became a writer in the 1850s. While Howe was an abolitionist, she did not believe in racial equality, shaping her views around an 1859 trip to Spanish Cuba. In November 1861, during the American Civil War, she had a dream of Rhode Island troops marching into battle, and she was inspired to write "The Battle Hymn of the Republic", a poem set to the words of "John Brown's Body" which became the unofficial anthem of the Union Army in February 1862. After the war, she became an active pacifist and women's rights advocate, and she died in 1910 at the age of 91.